Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We'd rented these from local stores so many times that my wife and I finally decide that we needed to buy our own. It seems like in the "home professional" carpet cleaner market there is basically Rug Doctor and the Bissell Big Green. I read so many reviews and watched so many videos comparing these two machines that I was having a very hard time deciding. Everyone swears that one of them is far superior to the other but it's never the same winner. In the end there were two things that pushed me to the Rug Doctor...one was that because I'd used them so many times I knew what to expect and knew how to use it to get our carpets properly cleaned (which, for me, is pre-treating the carpet and using only water with a little white vinegar in the machine). The other reason was something that I didn't see mentioned in many places but that seemed like a reasonable detail...Most carpet cleaners have a rotating brush towards the front while the Rug Doctor is one of the only machines where the brush moves side-to-side instead. It was explained to me that those rotating brushes tend to rip a lot of fibers out of the carpet...the Rug Doctor (supposedly!) minimizes this with it's agitating brush. For me, that was important as I don't want to be lessening the lifespan of my carpet every time I clean it. And while I don't necessarily have 'proof' of this claim I do know that when I cleaned using a borrowed, rotating brush machine, I saw fibers in the waste water. I don't see this with the Rug Doctor...only dirt.